MSNBC’s Saturday ‘AM Joy’ Topples CNN in Quarterly Ratings for First Time Ever

MSNBC anchor Joy Reid achieved a major milestone to start the year, overtaking her Saturday rivals at CNN in the quarterly ratings for the first time since her show launched on May 7, 2016.

It is actually the first time MSNBC has beaten CNN on Saturdays from 10 a.m.-noon ET in the key 25-54 demo in almost 16 years. On Saturday mornings, the overall “AM Joy” audience has jumped a whopping 33 percent from the comparable quarter last year. The MSNBC show is up 27 percent in the key demo on Saturdays, quarter-to-date.

Fox News remained the overall winner Saturday and Sunday from 10-12 in both total viewers and demo ratings.

The battle for second place also showed signs of tightening on Sunday, with Reid overtaking CNN in total viewers, but still falling short in the demo. Before this, MSNBC hadn’t averaged a larger overall audience than CNN in the Sunday time slot since the second quarter of 2001 — yeah, that’s an even longer drought snapped.

The data suggests MSNBC has the wind at their back. The double digits weekend increases for Reid come as both Fox and CNN saw similarly stark downturns for the same time slot. CNN has suffered the harsher losses of the two.

Beyond these Nielsen numbers, the ratings currency company’s social stats tell a similar story. Just check your Top United States Twitter Trends in the late morning this weekend: “AM Joy” will be among them.

Riding a wave of partisan opinion coverage, MSNBC has increasingly established itself as the liberal answer to Fox News and Reid’s profile on the network has only grown with her ratings.

In recent months, she has been increasingly willing to stand up to Fox directly, telling TheWrap just last week that the Fox News deliberately aimed to distort coverage of Black Lives Matter in order to portray protesters are villains for their audience.

Fox News called that characterization “baseless and hateful.”

9 Times New York Times Editorial Made Everyone Freak Out

Bari Weiss: We're All Fascists Now

The New York Times opinion editor set the Internet ablaze after going after college students who she said were trying to shut down free speech. Critics pointed to Weiss mistakenly linking two fake ANTIFA Twitter accounts

MSNBC

David Brooks: 'Girl I Want Your Body'

New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks offered his spin on the MeToo movement in November. But his attempt to speak the language of sex and passion led him to write some lines like "girl I want your body" and "sex is a gold nugget" and the Internet went nuts.

Getty

Bret Stephens' "A Defense, of Sorts, for Harvey Weinstein"

The October, 2017 piece was actually titled "Weinstein and Our Culture of Enablers," but Stephens couldn't resist throwing in the trollish alternative headline see above into a tweeted description of the article -- which promptly precipitated an Internet meltdown

David Brooks set passions aflame after urging "respect" for gun owners after 17 children were killed at a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. "So if you want to stop school shootings it's not enough just to vent and march. It's necessary to let people from Red America lead the way, and to show respect to gun owners at all points," he wrote.

Getty

Quinn "Been Friends with Various Neo-Nazis" Norton

The New York Times got more than they bargained for when they hired tech writer Quinn Norton. Almost immediately after the news was announced old tweets began to emerge including where Norton said she had "been friends with various neo-nazis" and used the N word. The Times cut her loose just hours after she was hired.

YouTube

Bari Weiss Attacks Aziz Ansari Accuser: 'I'll Get Crushed for This'

Weiss risked more wrath on the set of "Morning Joe" in January after blasting a woman who accused comedian Aziz Ansari of sexual misconduct. "It's called bad sex," she told Joe and Mika. "I'll get crushed for saying this."

TheWrap

Bari Weiss Quotes Hamilton: 'Immigrants: We Get the Job Done"

Anti-Weiss Internet mobs were set ablaze after she tweeted out "Immigrants: we get the job done," in response to Olympian Mirai Nagasu's triple axel. Nagasu was born in California to immigrant parents and Twitter furiously dragged her for not paying sufficient deference to the decision.

Getty

James Bennet Diversifies the Times Opinion Pages

Editorial Page Editor James Bennet has said his mission is to broaden editorial diversity on the Times newsroom. The initiative has often been rocky and the paper has been beset by online criticism of hiring choices, and targeted leaks by Times employees unhappy with his changes.

YouTube

David Brooks Sandwich-Shames Less Educated Friend

Perhaps most egregious of all in the mind of Internet warriors was Brooks' confession in a July, 2017 column that he once took a friend "with only a high school degree" into a gourmet sandwich shop but decided to pull a quick switch for Mexican food after, so he said, she appeared overwhelmed by words like Soppressata and Capicollo.

Creative Commons

1 of 9

Most of the recent fire and fury comes from the paper’s editorial pages

Bari Weiss: We're All Fascists Now

The New York Times opinion editor set the Internet ablaze after going after college students who she said were trying to shut down free speech. Critics pointed to Weiss mistakenly linking two fake ANTIFA Twitter accounts